Lorenzo Davids is the Executive Director of Urban Issues Consulting. Like a putrescent odour, the rotting legacy of 20 March 2003 still courses through my brain’s sensory pathways. Words such as “weapons of mass destruction”, coalition of the willing”, and axis of evil” created sufficient global madness to launch a million missiles onto Iraq.
A gullible world believed America. It believed Colin Powell when he held up that tiny vial at the UN Security Council meeting on 5 February 2003 to show how much anthrax or other biological material could kill thousands of people. Powell’s presentation was meant to scare the world.
It was meant to show that Iraq had WMD capabilities. It was meant to scare the world into believing that Iraq might share WMD with terrorists. It was meant to convince the UN that military action was necessary.
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Later, after somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqis lay dead on the ground, it was disclosed that no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons were found, no active nuclear weapons program existed, and that most intelligence claims were false or exaggerated. Powell later said, “It was a blot on my record”, and acknowledged that the evidence he presented was deeply flawed. The United States of America was wrong.
But it took about 1 million dead Iraqis to expose America’s lies. Over the last 50 years, the US has been the primary destabilising force in Latin America. Pinochet led a brutal dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.
Pinochet dissolved the Chilean Congress and suspended the constitution. Over 3,000 were killed or “disappeared”. Thousands more were tortured.
The USA sent a group of US economists known as the “Chicago Boys” to design new economic policies for Chile. They privatised state industries and cut social spending. State-owned banks were sold to private investors.
Other sectors, such as steel, petrochemicals, electricity, water, telecommunications, airlines, ports, railways, and infrastructure, were all privatised. The State pension system was replaced with privatised pension funds. All these were classic cases of state capture by the wealthy for personal enrichment.
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